“Reserve Cloud PCs” will be preloaded with Microsoft 365 apps and a user’s preferred security policies and other Windows customizations.

You need a working PC to access this ‘reserve’ PC. Why not just install Office on your own PC and ignore this extra cloud thing?

• Bring lots of audio entertainment pre-loaded on your phone (don’t rely on internet) or burnt to a CD. Podcast, audiobook, w/e. Boredom is the mind killer.
• Bring snacks that don’t leave your hands dirty.
• Bring a sandwich, it’s much cheaper than buying one.
• Bring a refrigerated and a frozen water bottle. The latter will still be cold for the second half of the trip.
• When you stop to pee/get gas, make sure you walk around for a few minutes. Your legs get tired just sitting.
• Both Google and Apple maps supports pre-downloading maps. This is very helpful if you need to set a route and you don’t have service where you happen to be.

I wouldn’t worry about it too hard, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with Ubuntu. Both it and mint are in the same family after all.

Sounds like you should just keep Ubuntu and get the non-snap versions of the apps that need codecs.

O, yeah. Snaps basically live in their own little system. Anything you do to your wider system, like installing codecs, will not affect a snap. Easiest solution is to remove the snap VLC and install normal VLC. Same for Firefox and MPC.

I have heard nothing good about snaps and Canonical pushing them is a big reason you don’t see people recommending Ubuntu, and instead recommending things like Mint (me included).

Yeah, I’m not sure why anybody is mentioning Windows IoT. When you lookup where to buy this, Microsoft themselves tell you to call or email a salesman; it’s an enterprise-only thing. Recommending this for individuals is misguided.

I know when you install Mint there is a ‘install codecs’ checkbox during the installer, not sure if the same exists for Ubuntu.

For Ubuntu, you could try this and see if it solves your problem.

Most people are willing to buy new hardware, and nobody pays for a Windows key tbh.

Many people are also not willing to buy new hardware. I have several friends where each PC purchase is a massive hit on their budget that requires other things to be sacrificed. And one does pay for a Windows key every time they buy a Windows PC. SIs who sell PCs with Windows as optional offer the Linux PCs for cheaper since you don’t have to pay the Windows license fee.

Even if they did it would be a free upgrade from 10 to 11.

Depends on the PC, some of them just will not go to 11, in which case you are talking about spending hundreds of dollars to go from Win 10 to Win 11, but $0 to go from Win 10 to Linux.

Enhanced Privacy

Once again not something people strictly care about.

Privacy is exactly what got me and one of my other friends to switch. Many, many people don’t like being spied on. And taking reasonable steps to reduce it is very much so within our control.

The implication that carbon emissions is something an individual can do something about has been objectively disproven.

Not buying something new and using what you have demonstrably helps. There is no world in which throwing away a perfectly good PC just to manufacture and transport another is somehow better for carbon emissions. Microsoft should not be rewarded for creating so much unnecessary ewaste by encouraging people to go out and buy another Windows PC.

Two of my friends switched recently precisely because Win 10 was going end of life. ‘I have to change the OS anyway’ was the final motivator.

intimidating complexity of installing Wine

I would give that a shot. The full guide is install ‘wine’ and ‘winetricks’ the same way you install any other software you use. Then in winetricks, select ‘default prefix’, then ‘run arbitrary executable’, and point it to your .exe installer. After that, you just open the program like any other program on your system.

You generally don’t need to do more than that and might let you forgo ever dual booting again.

Microsoft already lost enterprise servers to Linux, and has lost significant ground over the years in consumer PCs to ChromeOS, MacOS, and Linux. Hell, the top PC gaming handheld is a Linux offering. That was an unheard of idea just five years ago.

While I agree that business laptops will continue to be dominated by Windows for awhile, the market shifts we see everywhere have downstream effects on business laptops too. When you find yourself having to train more and more people on how to use Windows than you did in the past, the value argument for Windows on your employee’s laptops quickly comes into question.

Why the hell would we need AI summaries of a wikipedia article? The top of the article is explicitly the summary of the rest of the article.

You go to an eye doctor, they do the various tests and create a prescription with the necessary details to get you the right glasses. For the next year, you can use that prescription to buy glasses anywhere you want.

Any code reviewer will tell you code review is harder than writing code. And it gets harder and harder the lower the quality the code is; the more revisions and research the code reviewer needs to do to get the final product to a high quality.

One must consider how humans will interact with this part of the program (often this throws all kinds of spanners in the works), what happens when data comes in differently than expected, how other parts of the system work with this one, etc, etc, etc. Code that merely achieves the stated goals of a ticket can easily produce a dozen tickets later if not done right.

We need other ways to discover shit on the internet.

https://duckduckgo.com/

And this is exactly why I use ProtonMail. My old Gmail is now a junk folder I check…about never. It was actually much easier to switch over providers than I expected. I basically would just switch one over every time I logged into it. Everything else got to keep the junkmail account. :)

Crap, you are right, units should be in Wh not W/h and as a result I put the conversion to hours backwards. Well, that turns the whole thing from an impressive amount of energy to basically none!

Edit 2: Eheran pointed out I screwed up the math. Correct total energy output is 13μWh. A very, very, very small amount of energy.

(2x10¹⁵ W) * (25s/1x10¹⁸) * (1 h/ 3600 s) = 13μWh

Previous bad math:

especially if you wanted to play Halo on PC

I still giggle that after years and years of Halo 3+ being a console exclusive, and Halo 2 sucking on Windows for years*, the entire Halo collection now has a Gold rating on Linux. I have very specific memories of being annoyed for years that the most prestigious Microsoft game doesn’t work on a Microsoft gaming platform (Windows).

*God damn does Games for Windows Live suck

Yeah, and as long as these things never touch the internet, there really isn’t an issue.

Good on the judge for following up on the citations. Something the law firm should have done before even submitting them!